Why English doesn't use accents • Hacker News Board

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#11

Post by dijit » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

boredatoms wrote: post #7

andy99 wrote: post #6

I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.

English is currently popular because money is always popular

This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct.

If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.

Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".

Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#12

Post by amelius » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#13

Post by dijit » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:53 PM UTC

Affric wrote: post #5

Dwedit wrote: post #4

Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.

If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.

Why is it trivial?

The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#14

Post by SnooSux » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:55 PM UTC

porphyra wrote: post #8

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker.

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#15

Post by nlawalker » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:56 PM UTC

porphyra wrote: post #8

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#16

Post by duskwuff » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

porphyra wrote: post #8

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".

Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#17

Post by porphyra » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

SnooSux wrote: post #14

porphyra wrote: post #8

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker. https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...

Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#18

Post by PyWoody » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #3

mikequinlan wrote: post #2

Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.

If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing: e ' Which was called "overstriking".

If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_subscript

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#19

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #6

I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.

[deleted]

Re: Why English doesn't use accents

#20

Post by OneMorePerson » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:13 PM UTC

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #9

andy99 wrote: post #6

I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.

Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image. Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance. I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way

Given the meaning of "accent" given in the article Chinese seems like a very accented language (saying that as a Mandarin speaker). Aren't Chinese tones the very definition of an accented language? (as defined by the article, accent is a broad term)